Research being conducted on behalf of the Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster, or Swine Innovation Porc, is focusing on the evaluation and development of standards for swine production systems.

Research scientist engineering with the Prairie Swine Centre Dr Bernardo Predicala says scientists are evaluating the value of standards in other industries, benchmarking existing systems in swine operations, and evaluating codes and standards to determine what changes are required to optimize swine production.

Dr Bernardo Predicala-Prairie Swine Centre:

We're aiming to identify gaps between existing standards and actual practices so we can identify where areas for improvement can be focused on.

Also we would like to identify areas where new standards are needed either to improve existing practices or to put new guidelines on current practices and improve these practices.

The main beneficiaries for this work will be pork producers but also building contractors or designers would also benefit from having these standards or guidelines for them to use when they're putting up new buildings for example or other stakeholders like for example manure applicators or even truckers when we're talking about possibly new standards on animal handling or in manure spreading.

Dr Bernardo Predicala acknowledges there's wide variability among the different systems so we need to develop some kind of universal criteria for obtaining benchmark information on actual performance of these different systems.

He says this requires significant industry participation to obtain reliable benchmark information as well as participation by stakeholders such as contractors, veterinarians and others that are involved with the industry.